Email Marketing Strategy Plan

A hard truth about a successful strategy is that it doesn’t come easy. A strategy is a plan which is aimed to achieve certain goals. It requires detailed research to define your business goals and a course of action that decides how you can achieve the same.

If you own a business and you need help with your email marketing strategy plan then you've landed on the right article!

Identify Your Target Audience

Before you even think of initiating a marketing campaign, you need to identify your target audience. Marketing your business to a user who is not in need of your business services/products will be a complete waste of your time and effort.

Ask yourself these question in order to collect your mailing list: What kind of people are looking for your products or services? Where will you find these people? What are the various ways of capturing the contact information of these people?

Understanding your audience will not only help you draft your email accordingly, but it will also make sure that you can find your database easily. To carry out targeted and effective email marketing, you need a database of potential customers.

What Are You Offering?

Once you have a database in place and know who you will be sending your email marketing campaign to, you need to figure out what you want to offer to them.

Whatever you plan to offer to your database or subscribers must add value to them. Whether it is a product or service, a promotional offer or a massive sale, your offerings must be seen as valuable to them. Unless you offer them something they can benefit from, your email marketing campaign is likely to fail.

The offerings can vary from business to business. For some businesses giving free eBooks, coupon voucher works to get a good response and generate more revenue. Whereas for some giving personalized suggestions/tips to the users helps in sustaining the users. These could also include free articles, PDF’s and podcasts!

Choose Email Marketing Tools

There are various marketing tools present today, but you must pick the one that is most suitable for your business and one that helps you achieve your goals and targets. Some of the well-known email marketing tools are AWeber, MailChimp, Active Campaign etc.

Depending on your needs, the size and nature of your campaign, pick an email automation tool that works perfectly for you. At RedAlkemi, we prefer using MailChimp and Active Campaign. Email marketing automation tools help you send the right email to the right users at the right time and help maximize the impact of your communication.

Email Segmentation

This is the process of grouping individuals based on certain characteristics or behaviour in order to send specific emails that are targeted to them. The idea is to categorize the audience based on certain characteristics.

If you go by the statistics, email segmentation helps a lot in making your email marketing campaign successful. The email open rates increase by 15% and this also helps reduce the unsubscribing rate by 10%.

Choose the Types of Emails to Send

If you have received promotional emails from organizations or brands, then you have been a part of an email marketing campaign without even realizing it!

When the holiday or festive season arrives, you start getting promotional emails from various companies. Why? Because either they are trying to increase their subscribers or they are heavily marketing their business.

This is for you to decide, what is it that you want to achieve from this email marketing campaign. Do you want to send out newsletters, promotional emails or announcements?

Generally, businesses use promotional discount emails to increase their database and subscriber list. Once they have a good number of subscribers, they send out monthly newsletters to draw the subscribers to a specific landing page.

Design

Now that you have your audience, database and type of email in place, it’s time to design your email marketing campaign. As with any other written content, the layout of the email content must give out information depending on their priority. The content you choose to include in your email has a huge impact on your entire marketing campaign.

The email marketing content strategy basically revolves around the basic rule of writing i.e. K.I.S.S (keep it short and simple).

You only have a few seconds to grab a user’s attention. So make sure that the subject line is short and self-explanatory and reflects what your email is about. Write the content in such a format that a reader can easily scan through your content. Here are 5 best practices for writing email content.

Mailer Performance

Once you have designed your email and have sent it out to your chosen database, keep a tab on the performance of the campaign.

This is important if you want to improve your future email marketing campaigns and identify problem areas in your current email marketing campaign.

The various parameters to look out for are the opening rates, unique open rates, unsubscribed rates and the click-through rate etc.

A well-planned and designed email marketing campaign can do wonders for your brand, sales and success! Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to get in touch with your current and potential customers.

Have you tried email marketing before? How successful has your email marketing strategy for 2018 been? Let us know in the comments below!

David Williams

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Anuja Lath

Digital Marketing Guru

Anuja is India's #7 LinkedIn Top Voice 2017. She is the Co-founder and CEO of RedAlkemi Online Pvt. Ltd., a digital marketing agency helping clients with their end to end online presence. Anuja has 30 years of work experience as a successful entrepreneur and has co-founded several ventures since 1986. She and her team are passionate about helping SMEs achieve measurable online success for their business. Anuja holds a Bachelors degree in Advertising from the Government College of Fine Arts, Chandigarh, India.

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